From: Phillip Gawlowski Date: 2008-04-18T14:36:10+09:00 Subject: Re: Ada vs Ruby -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Tom Cloyd wrote: | For what it's worth, in my profession (clinical applied psychology/ | psychotherapy), it's written into our professional ethics that decisions | are always to be made by people, not by some testing device, instrument, | or technology. Sometimes we merely review and approve, but that human is | required to be there. Very few people object to this, especially after a | little reflection. It is a sad state of affairs, if this has to be written down and people have to think about this, before it makes sense to them. This reminds me of the late Joseph Weizenbaum's shock he felt, when people accepted ELIZA as more than a toy, which led to his seminal work "Computer Power and Human Reason"[0], arguing my case better than I ever could. This quote encompasses it, methinks: "I want them [teachers of computer science] to have heard me affirm that the computer is a powerful new metaphor for helping us understand many aspects of the world, but that it enslaves the mind that has no other metaphors and few other resources to call on. The world is many things, and no single framework is large enough to contain them all, neither that of man's science nor of his poetry, neither that of calculating reason nor that of pure intuition."[1] It is sad that we, as human beings, so eagerly submit ourselves to the seeming rule of computers (SkyNET and its counterparts in science-fiction, anyone?). | Cross-validation of process, eh? Yes, indeed. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Reason [1] http://www.smeed.org/1735 - -- Phillip Gawlowski Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan Use the good features of a language; avoid the bad ones. ~ - The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plaugher) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkgIMz0ACgkQbtAgaoJTgL+3TwCgh7PiK5Iu16yACUBGujoJ+Lgp ecMAn0mU6dxJLYNKrY4Vp7MDx/9nz4Ci =3gHq -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----